Starting a Blog: Week 26

For those who don’t know I decided that I wanted to chronicle my experience of starting a blog. The intent is so others can learn what it takes to start a blog, learn from my mistakes throughout the process, and to hopefully provide some humor and enjoyment to your day. I think I will run this “Starting a Blog” series for 52 weeks to provide a well-rounded beginning to starting a blog that you fully intend to turn into a business. (Please know, that affiliate links may be used in this post which means I would earn a little bit of money if you decide to purchase through some of my links. But, I promise to always be honest and to only recommend those things that I personally use and enjoy!)

I’ve decided these weekly updates will be posted on weekends and will consist of 6 categories to help summarize my progress each week.

Blog Improvements

My week in Review

Extra Income Earned

Extra Income Received

Goals I accomplished During the Week

Goal for Next Week

I know this will be very similar to my monthly income reports, but I think having weekly and monthly goals are going to help me stay focused and break my bigger goals down into smaller ones. This should help me in accomplishing my monthly goals, but also allow me to celebrate additional small successes that may happen throughout each week.

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Blog Improvements

Design Improvements:

I didn’t focus on the design or look of my blog this week. It wasn’t one of my goals, therefore I did not focus on it.

Time spent on my blog this week:

Well, I definitely did not spend a lot of time working on my blog this week. One of the biggest reasons was because I watched the latest episode of American Horror Story this season. (If you watched it you will understand) The creepy ghost girl completely freaked me out and I could not sleep this weekend! Seriously, I think I got about 10 hours of sleep in 3 days. I tend to have really productive weeks and then some not so productive weeks. All together I believe I spent about 7 hours or so working on blog related tasks this week.

Blog Posts:

Add to All- This plug-in allows me to add custom code to my header, footer, sidebar, basically anywhere. I haven’t started playing with this yet, but I plan too soon.

Boss Affiliate- This plug-in allows me to automatically add my disclosure policy to the top of any post using a specific tag. So I basically, learned how tags worked this week. Go me!

Affiliate Partners:

I did not add any new affiliate partners, but I did technically finalize my partnership with Groupon. I had applied months ago, but I had never updated my account information. Since I made my post this week about Groupon, I finally did this, but now I am having trouble figuring out how to get my affiliate link. So for now, I am still just using my referral link, but I’m working on fixing this soon. Does anyone know how to get your link?

Email Subscribers:

I am at 51 email subscribers this week, which means I only gained 1. I’m not sure what happened. I’m wondering if something is going on with all the different ways I have available for people to subscribe. Currently, I use the Mailchimp subscription box in my side bar, I have the Sumo Me pop-up, and I have the Rapidology subscription box at the end of all my posts. I know when I added the Rapidology subscription box, I un-clicked the double opt-in option through Mailchimp. I’m wondering if that has something to do with this? Anyone have any insight on this?

Traffic Updates:

Here is what my analytics looked like compared to last week:

Last Week

This Week

Sessions

419

390

-29

Pageviews

604

525

-79

Users

387

357

-30

Average Session Duration

1:04

00:37

-00:27

New Sessions

87.35%

88.46%

+1.11%

Pages/Session

1.44

1.35

-0.09

Bounce Rate

82.34%

84.62%

+2.28%

I think the drop I’m seeing is because I wasn’t as productive on Pinterest as I was in previous weeks. Hopefully, I’ll improve next week.

My Week in Review

Personal Accomplishments:

I made our first $1,000 payment towards the care credit card we took out for our cat’s surgery. We now owe $1,500 on this card which I plan to have paid off by the end of the month. I plan on writing a post about how we were able to do this so definitely be on the lookout for this.

My husband and I have started going to the gym together to help motivate me. We went together 3 times this week, and then I went once by myself. So I went to the gym a total of 4 times this week!

My husband and I had a date night together this week. I honestly, don’t remember the last time we spent time together just the two of us.

Productivity Tips & Tricks:

Get sleep! This was the number one reason I was less productive this week. I was just entirely too exhausted and just couldn’t sleep.

Set time aside for yourself and anyone important in your life. Sometimes, you need a break and it’s good to let yourself have that.

Webinars

I did not attend any webinars this week. I did have one scheduled during my lunch break at work, but I wasn’t able to log in. So I plan on watching the recording of this webinar this week.

Setbacks

Something happens every week right? So I just made the $1,000 payment on the care card yesterday. Today, my car wouldn’t start. I drove to the grocery store to get some milk, walked back out about 7 minutes later and it just would not turn on. Thankfully, there was an auto zone adjacent to the grocery store and they gave me a battery charger. My car was able to turn back on and I drove it around for 30 minutes before bringing it back and it still worked fine when I tried turning it on again. So, now we are going to be taking my car to be checked this week because it’s at 60,000 miles and I’ve never had to replace the battery so I’m hoping I just need to replace the battery and not the alternator. I’ll keep you posted!!!

Extra Income Earned: $30.42

(If you would like to learn how you can start earning extra income, check outmy Resources page) Please note I do not include Google AdSense income here because it isn’t confirmed until a month later.

Goals I Accomplished This Week

Figure out how to add my disclosure policy as a link in my footer and remove from my pages category- Fail. Sigh, I didn’t meet all my goals this week.

Add a plug-in that automatically places my disclosure policy in my posts so I don’t have to manually. –Pass! I was playing around with this, and I did get it to work, but I didn’t like the way it looked. I’ll keep you posted on this once I get it finalized.

Create my freebie-Pass! Guys this has been stressing me out! I have tons of ideas but very limited knowledge on how to actually create these visuals. So, I finally have my freebie put together as a 2nd rough draft. I want to add a few more things, and improve the design, but I hope to have it up and running by the end of the month!

Add a landing page to my blog- Fail. But!!! I purposefully did not work on this goal, because it is my assignment this upcoming week in my blogging coaching group. So I am moving this goal to next week.

Write 2 additional future posts-Pass!Now these are just first drafts so I still need to edit and get the pictures updated, but I did finish writing them!

Goals for Next Week

Finalize my freebie to improve the branding and design

Figure out how to add my disclosure in my footer instead of in my tabs bar

Update my category options

Publish 1 post

Write 2 more posts

Guys this blogging business is so much fun!!!! I am so committed and I can’t wait to see how my blog continues to grow! I hope that you are feeling inspired to start your own blog or to follow your own dreams! If you’d like to start your own blog, I created a tutorial on how to do so usingBlueHost. Check out my How to Start a Blog Page to start your own blog!

Share below what you have been doing this week to meet your blogging and personal goals!

Amanda

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2 Comments

Congrats on another great week Amanda! I have just got the same plugin, how funny 🙂
Sorry to hear about your car, how annoying. Cars are the worst!
Well done on paying off that hefty chunk of debt, that’s amazing!Francesca – From Pennies to Pounds recently posted…Make Money From Your Hobbies